This paper presents and clarifies the academic and industrial terminology used in the area of product recovery. It is concluded that there exist many different concepts and definitions in academia and industry, several of which are unclearly defined. Given this, a new way to define product recovery is presented through the use of a model. This model is based on actual industrial product recovery cases, existing academic product recovery concepts and definitions and product design theory. The presentation contains a holistic model that can be used for describing and analyzing different product recovery scenarios. In addition, several industry cases are presented as a verification of the model.